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Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. -- C S Lewis

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Sunday, 30 September 2012

The Tasmanian Endgame

Sometimes I try to imagine what the world might be like if the tobacco control industry succeeds in eradicating smokers. My mind races with various scenarios and possibilities, almost all of them negative, totalitarian, and tyrannical -- a Public Health dictatorship, evil and unforgiving. These imagined scenarios are always followed by more questions, and some of the obvious ones that come to my mind are:

Would it be like Nazi Germany's failed quest to create its genetically-superior race of people by exterminating everyone who failed to live up to their standards of eugenics? Every time I see some hateful motherfucker from the hell on earth that is the Public Health movement say that smokers cost the NHS or other health services money, I think of this Nazi propaganda like this:

Propaganda for Nazi Germany's T-4 Euthanasia Program:
"This person suffering from hereditary defects costs the community
60,000 Reichsmark during his lifetime. Fellow German, that is your
money, too." from the Office of Racial Policy's Neues Volk.
Source: Wikipedia (image now deleted from Wikipedia)

You need only substitute "suffering from hereditary defects" for "suffering from nicotine addiction" in the caption above. Socialised healthcare, to a large extent, ultimately fosters the misguided belief that some people are simply not worth treating because it costs society money. But eugenics, which was conceived by Charles Darwin's cousin, Sir Francis Galton, first took root in American universities before finally being warmly embraced by Nazi Germany, believes that some people are genetically inferior and not worth treating at all. We are not quite at the eugenics stage yet -- or are we?

But if the world does not end up like Nazi Germany, then would it be more like the failed War On Drugs, a world where people are arrested for the mere possession of tobacco products for personal use and jailed with truly dangerous criminals? After all, if nicotine is equally dangerous as other drugs like heroin, then surely it's only a matter of time before tobacco is added to the list of illegal drugs (or made available only from a pharmacist to licensed smokers) with laws enforced by a paramilitary SWAT team, which is only too happy to invade your private residence and gleefully shoot your spaniel.

Of course, many in the tobacco control industry know that proposing outright prohibition of tobacco will lead to a backlash of negative opinion and hurt the industry's cause. Prohibition will cause the industry's public health funds to dry up too. Musn't allow that to happen! Livelihoods are stake. So the plan is to introduce piecemeal legislation over time and whittle away at the public's resolve whilst the tobacco control industry continues to suck taxpayers dry in order to create new invidious ventures into public health advocacy.

If ever attempted, prohibition will fail, as it always does. But abolition of all tobacco products is another matter entirely. If tobacco does not exist, then it cannot be used by anyone. Abolition is the endgame (or end-date thinking). Where better to test the murky waters of abolition than down under in Tasmania?

The endgame of abolition begins with age-based selective prohibition: anyone born in the year 2000 or later will not be able to purchase cigarettes. It simultaneously aims to re-engineer cigarettes to make them unpalatable. It further aims to make cigarettes more difficult to obtain. And finally, it aims to indoctrinate an entire generation with as much government-controlled anti-smoker propaganda that taxpayer money can buy.

The proposal forecasts a reduction in retail outlets or other
mechanisms for reducing availability. As Tasmania already has a
licensing system, and effective enforcement for retail sales, this can
be tackled.

The great novelty of Mr Dean’s proposal is that it incorporates two
key elements that have been proposed as elements of planning for a
tobacco end-game. These are mandated product modification to make
cigarettes less addictive and/or palatable and the birth-date bases
proscription of tobacco purchase and use that would forever prohibit the
sale of cigarettes to anyone born after the year 2000.

To make this happen, you need a majority of public support. To get that support (or at least soften people up a bit) you need the mainstream media on your side. As we already know, the media cannot be trusted to be fair and impartial. The media is content to provide only one viewpoint to its viewers and readers, as evidenced by the following Al Jazeera broadcast. Not a single voice of opposition is presented here (WARNING! Contains brief but horrible graphic imagery of super nanny NYC Mayor Bloomberg):

There's a problem, though. This campaign of hate doesn't abolish tobacco, although that is certainly its goal. It's a confidence trick: Give some people the illusion of fairness with a built-in grandfather clause whilst claiming you are protecting the young children. It's a ruse evilly designed to appear utterly reasonable to the closed-minded, so long as they wilfully fail to consider that other things, say, cannabis and other drugs, have been illegal for decades and the kids are still using those despite the laws.

They know damned well that kids are going to have access to tobacco somehow, whether it is given to them, or whether they work in shops that sell tobacco, or whether the kids simply steal it or seek out the illicit market. The tobacco control industry is counting on it.

In order to move a little closer to the abolition stage, the tobacco control industry only needs to show that A) Tasmanian kids are still able to get tobacco products from older people or by travelling to other Australian states, and B) that tobacco availability elsewhere in the world is harming Tasmanian children. And that will kick off a further chain of events leading to abolition, and the WHO will be leading the charge insisting that every child must be vaccinated against nicotine addiction.

The only way to keep everyone from smoking is to make tobacco wholly unavailable. This is the endgame, but they know that it can never happen voluntarily. They will force their lifestyle rules upon all of us relentlessly and tirelessly.

They will attack the hard-working tobacco farmers and through regressive taxation and penalties force the farmers to stop growing tobacco, ultimately stealing the farmer's land.

They will not let you smoke in your own home, which you own, because smoke-drift will enter the house's electrics, travel down the wires and kill people up to five miles away.

They will not let you work, and certainly never let you become a teacher, or a nurse, or a doctor because your smoking could harm and infect the children's minds. Companies will test their employees for tobacco use and those caught will be sacked and may never be able to find suitable employment again. Suicide rates will increase dramatically.

If a hapless child ever sees any adult smoking, in real life, on the Internet or even in a film on TV, that child will be deemed tainted and taken away to be reprogrammed by the state.

Any parent who smokes in their car (or even dares to smoke outside their homes) might be violently arrested for child abuse -- a happy idealised world full of kids who are ripped from their mother's bosom and their father's arms by balaclava-wearing paramilitary tobacco-enforcement teams.

Endgame. What does it really mean? How can it be achieved? The endgame might lead to all of the above, for evidently some people will not conform, so it can only be enforced by a dictatorial and totalitarian state.

Despite all of the hate and violence that the tobacco abolition endgame will certainly bring into the world, if the endgame happens then someone, somewhere will light up a cigarette anyway.